Down in Turkey Far Away`: Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres in

Transcription

Contemporary Issues in Historical Perspective
“Down in Turkey, far away”: Human Rights, the Armenian
Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany*
Margaret Lavinia Anderson
University of California, Berkeley
Famous in the annals of German drama is a scene known as the “Easter stroll,”
in which the playwright takes leave, briefly, from his plot to depict a cross section
of small-town humanity enjoying their holiday. Snatches of conversation drift
across the stage, the everyday things that ordinary Germans have on their minds:
romance (if they’re young women), sex (if young men), and (for the rest) those
eternal verities: taxes, local politics—and the Eastern Question.
One townsman remarks,
On a Sunday or holiday, what can be better
Than on war and its pother to enjoy a palaver
Whenever down in Turkey, far away,
The folks are out bashing one another.
To stand at the window, toss back a glass,
[The strollers have clearly now reached a pub]
Watch the bright boats gliding past;
Then at dusk, to stroll on home,
Blessing peace and quiet times.
Whereupon his companion defensively replies,
And OK by me, mate!
Let them split each other’s skulls!
And if everything there falls apart? Whatever!
So long as all’s the same right here.1
The play is Goethe’s Faust, and this brief exchange soon became proverbial in
Germany: hauled out during Bavarian Landtag elections in the 1850s, when debate turned to the Crimea; in the 1870s, after the Russo-Turkish war; in the 1890s,
during massacres of Christians in Szechwan—indeed, whenever talk arose of
doing something to stop someone else’s skull from being split. The tag “down in
* I thank Mustafa Aksakal, Hermann Goltz, Axel Meißner, and above all Stephan Astourian, my colleague at Berkeley, for invaluable help. I am grateful to the ACLS and to
the Stanford Humanities Center for leave support.
1
All translations, unless noted otherwise, are my own.
The Journal of Modern History 79 (March 2007): 80–111
䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2007/7901-0003$10.00
All rights reserved.
“Down in Turkey, far away”
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Turkey, far away,” as a metonym for torments that barbarians inflict on each other,
in which “we” are happily not involved, might be invoked (not always approvingly) by anyone from Catholic journalists to Marxist revolutionaries to Wilhelmine aristocrats.2 Recently, it has embellished the press conference of a German
foreign minister, the sermon of a bishop, the arguments of Germany’s Muslims:
it is part of the cultural repertoire of every German with a high school education.3
Yet Goethe’s lines clearly meant not to recommend but to satirize the philistinism of his countrymen, so insulated behind their town walls that the horrors
on Europe’s periphery became mere titillation for comfortable Spießbürger, armchair strategists enjoying their frisson of horror (and superiority) on a sunny
afternoon. Goethe’s insight—how distance destroys fellow feeling—was not, of
course, unique. In 1759, Adam Smith had noted wryly that a man who knew that
he was “to lose his little finger tomorrow, . . . would not sleep tonight. But, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the
ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren.”4 And just six years before Faust,
Chateaubriand had offered a chilling variation on the same theme in the form of
a thought experiment that became known, after Balzac recycled it in Père Goriot
in 1835, as the Chinese Mandarin Question. The question was this: What would
you do if you could inherit a fortune, without leaving home and without risk of
punishment or even discovery, simply by willing the death “of an old Chinese
mandarin”? Though Chateaubriand had raised the question in order to insist that
Examples: Otto Franke, on the Russo-Turkish war, as seen in sleepy Zerbst, Erinnerungen aus zwei Welten (Berlin, 1954), 21 (I owe this reference to Suzanne Marchand);
Edmund Jörg, on the Bavarian Landtag and on Szechwan, “Die ‘Christen-Massacres’ in
China und die Missionen,” Historisch-Politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland
116 (1895): 604–25, 604; Rosa Luxemburg, “Die nationalen Kämpfe in der Türkei und
die Sozialdemokratie III,” Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung, no. 236, Oct. 10, 1896, and “Zur
Orientpolitik des ‘Vorwärts,’ ibid., no. 273, Nov. 25, 1896, both reprinted in Luxemburg,
Gesammelte Werke (hereafter GW) (Berlin, 1982), 1, pt. 1:67, 70; Richard von Kühlmann,
merging and mangling Goethe’s lines to express nostalgia, in spite of “war and its pother,”
for the life “down there in Turkey,” to Paul Weitz, May 30, 1915, Auswärtigen Amt Abt.
I (hereafter AAI), NL Weitz, Bd. 6.
3
Joschka Fischer, referring to Africa: Der Spiegel, Dec. 20, 2003; Cem Özdemir, on fears
of Islamic fundamentalism not only “down in Turkey, far away” but also “in the middle of
Duisburg-Maxloh”: “Allah’u akbar,” http://www.oeko-net.de/kommune/kommune4-98/
kolcem4.html; Haydar Isik, on Germany’s historical support for Turkey’s suppression of
the Kurds: “Die Kurden: Demokratische Kraft der Region,” http://www.nahost-politik.de/
europa/kurden.htm; Easter sermon calling for solidarity with “brothers and sisters” in Kosovo, Würzburg cathedral, April 4, 1999, http://www.kirchenserver.net/bwo/opencms/
sites/bistum/bistum/bischof_em/box/1999/04_04_99.html. The tag also shows up commercially, lending products a Goethean glow, as in the title of J. Seyppel and T. Rilsky’s
travel guide, Hinten weit in der Türkei: Reisen und Leben (Wiesbaden, 1983).
4
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. A. L. Macfie and D. D. Raphael (1759; Oxford,
1976), 3 [3.4], 136–37, quoted in Thomas Laqueur, whose essay and the volume in which
it appears have stimulated these thoughts: “The Moral Imagination and Human Rights,”
in Michael Ignatieff et al., Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutman
(Princeton, NJ, 2001), 133.
2
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conscience would, in the end, prevail, Balzac’s character replies, “Oh, I’m on my
thirty-third mandarin.”5
The enormous difficulty of establishing a moral connection, a sense of obligation, toward someone you can’t see—indeed, never will see—is a universal
one. It is the greatest obstacle that faces any NGO—Doctors without Borders,
Amnesty International, and countless others—that tries to mobilize support to
address what Thomas Laqueur calls “distant suffering.” Even those who are neither as insouciant as Goethe’s ordinary Germans nor as callous as Balzac’s Bianchon, those who feel genuine dismay at hearing others’ bad news, are unlikely to
exert themselves in any sustained way. Our common humanity does not, in practice, compel action. As Hannah Arendt concluded upon surveying the plight of
displaced persons after the world wars: “It seems that a man who is nothing but
a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat
him as a fellow man.”6
What does it take to pry open the circle of obligation, to admit as “fellows”
those whose suffering is out of sight? “Love thy neighbor!” is a commandment
embedded in many religious traditions. Yet since biblical times it has elicited the
evasive response, “Who is my neighbor?” The answer to that question, so vital
to humanitarians, presupposes an answer to yet another: “Who am I?” And both
have historically been conditioned by our answers to yet a third: “Who is not my
neighbor?”—in academic parlance, “Who is the ‘Other’?” “Brotherhood entails
Otherhood,” it has been said.7 They are two sides of the same coin. And which
side is up helps explain the differential success, or failure, of human rights activists then and now.
In recent years we have come to see both identity and alterity as deeply implicated in something that Edward Said has taught us to call “Orientalism,” a
discourse that invents and exalts a Western Self by contrasting it to an essentialized Islamic Other. My essay puts pressure on Said’s dichotomies. It takes as its
starting point one of the West’s earliest and most universal movements to address
distant suffering, a movement occasioned by the massacre, beginning in 1894
and continuing for more than two years, of some 200,000 or more Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire of Abdul Hamid II.8 In the epoch inaugurated by these
5
Chateaubriand, in The Genius of Christianity (1802), posed the question without using
the word “mandarin.” Chateaubriand and Balzac are quoted in Carlo Ginzburg, “Killing a
Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 46–61, 53.
6
The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), 300. A recent consideration of this
problem by philosophers and political theorists: Deen Chatterjee, ed., The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge, 2004).
7
Benjamin Nelson, quoted in John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (New
York, 1985), 62; emphasis mine.
8
The English edition of Johannes Lepsius’s Armenia and Europe: An Indictment (London, 1897) gives an 88,000-plus figure in a statistical table (330–31) taken from earlier
figures compiled a year before the massacres ended. He adds subsequent deaths in his
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pogroms, “down in Turkey, far away” ceased to be a metonym and became the
actual site of pain. After a brief survey of countries where Armenian human rights
(as they were called even then) attracted significant political support, I will turn
to Wilhelmine Germany, where activists had a notably thin time of it.9 Many of
the groups that elsewhere took up the Armenian cause were here pulled by countervailing interests. In Germany, moreover, the very discourse employed on behalf
of Armenians was turned against them, and a counterdiscourse, one we might
well term Orientalist, was deployed against an Armenian Other in order to champion their Muslim antagonists. Thus, to an extent that undercuts simple notions
of Orientalism, German spokesmen succeeded in diluting sympathy for the victims and shifting it to the perpetrators. After offering some hypotheses to explain
why German responses took this exceptional turn, I will conclude with more
general reflections provoked by these responses to the Armenian-Turkish conflict:
on the inevitable weakness of the category “human”; on the kaleidoscopic nature
of “right here” and “far away”; and on the permeable boundaries of Germany’s
(and our) “Europe” and “Orient.”
I. GEOPOLITICS AND ARMENOPHILE NARRATIVES
No one, let us stipulate, who works for another’s human rights has ever been
satisfied with the public’s response, and those engaged on behalf of the Armenians
were no exception. The English Quaker J. Rendell Harris was “tempted to despair.”10 Prime Minister Salisbury, who labored mightily to build a united front
among the Great Powers to put pressure on Abdul Hamid, exclaimed after months
of fruitless negotiations that he did not believe that, outside England, “from Archangel to Cadiz there is a soul who cares whether the Armenians are exterminated
preface (entitled “A Later Note,” xix), for a total of ca. 100,000. These did not include
those who died later from wounds, exposure, or loss of breadwinner. By 1903, French and
Italian commentators were putting the number of victims at 300,000. Pour l’Arménie et la
Macédoine (Paris, 1904), vii, 64, 142, 184–85, 250–53. As in most mass killings, authoritative figures are unavailable.
9
The term “human rights” used by Social Democrats: “Erklärung,” Vorwärts, no. 265,
Nov. 11, 1896; by Catholics: “Die Protestversammlung gegen die türkischen Greuel in
Armenien,” Germania, no. 226, Sept. 30, 1896, 2. Blatt; and by Liberals: Friedrich Naumann, “Zur Armenierfrage,” Die christliche Welt (hereafter ChW) 12, no. 50, Dec. 15,
1898, cols. 1185–88, esp. 1187, and “Asia”: Eine Orientreise über Athen, Konstantinopel,
Baalbek, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Kairo, Neapel, 5th printing (Berlin-Schoneberg, 1904), 138.
Thanks to Chris Nickerson for copies of Germania and other papers from 1895–97. Although one can distinguish humanitarian from human rights activism, in the case of minority populations the two tend to bleed into each other, the food, shelter, and medical
care emphasized by the former often being dependent upon basic political protections
demanded by the latter. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers,
the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge, 2004), does not
include Armenians.
10
Harris to Johannes Lepsius, Dec. 22, 1896, in Lepsius, Armenia and Europe, x.
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or not.” France’s ambassador to Constantinople, Paul Cambon, who shared Salisbury’s horror at the massacres, seconded the complaint.11
“We see the world through the stories we tell,” notes Mark Danner. That is,
we make sense of information we acquire only incrementally “by placing it in a
context we have already constructed.”12 To move the public from the default mode
depicted in Faust, from its traditional suspicion that the mass killings “down in
Turkey, far away” were simply one more round in an eternal cycle of violence—
with no right, no wrong, no end, and therefore no meaning—required spokesmen
who could fit Armenians and Turks into a narrative in which listeners could
imagine themselves. Eventually, Armenia’s advocates succeeded in supplying
such narratives, generating when they did so broad public backing. In Switzerland, activists performed this feat by figuring the Armenians as another “small
mountain people,” one whose survival over the centuries, in the face of large and
powerful neighbors, was testimony to their grit. In 1896, the Swiss collected a
million francs for Armenian relief and more signatures of support than on any
petition in their history.13 To the English-speaking world, the Armenians were
outposts of Western enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire. The Liberal warhorse
William Ewart Gladstone proclaimed that “to serve Armenia is to serve civilization,” a line quoted in New York on the masthead of Armenia, a monthly. Just
as in Britain the Armenian cause attracted Liberals, in the United States its activists—Julia Ward Howe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Jacob Schiff come to
mind—typified those strata most invested in the progressive narrative. In all three
countries a genuine mass movement, one that crossed political and religious lines,
was mobilized behind the Armenian cause.14
In France, too, the paladins of the Armenians spanned the political spectrum.
Both the quondam royalist Count Albert de Mun and the leader of the socialists,
Jean Jaurès, lodged parliamentary interpellations in fall of 1896, demanding to
know what their government planned to do about the Armenians. The antiCatholic fire-eaters Georges Clemenceau and Anatole France joined Monseigneur
Félix Charmétant, of the White Fathers, in sounding the alarm.15 The most prominent advocates, however, founders in 1900 of Pro Arménia, were men of the Left:
Pierre Quillard, Francis de Pressensé, Bernard Lazare—all committed Dreyfusards, all members of the League of the Rights of Men. For men like these, it
11
Salisbury, quoted in Roy Douglas, “Britain and the Armenian Question, 1894–7,”
Historical Journal 19, no. 1 (1976): 113–34, 120–21; Cambon, quoted in ibid., 125–26.
12
“The Memo, the Press, and the War: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, Aug.
11, 2005, 62, and “Iraq: The New War,” ibid., Sept. 25, 2003, 88.
13
Hans-Lukas Kieser, “Die Schweiz des Fin de Siècle und ‘Armenien’: Patriotische
Identifikation, Weltbürgertum und Protestantismus in der Schweizerischen Philarmenischen Bewegung,” in Die Armenische Frage, ed. Kieser (Zurich, 1999), 133–57.
14
Thomas C. Leonard, “When News Is Not Enough: American Media and Armenian
Deaths,” in America and the Armenian Genocide, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge, 2003),
294–308.
15
“Die orientalische Frage in der französischer Kammer,” Germania, no. 257, Nov. 5,
1896, 1. Blatt, 1.
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was second nature to translate Armenian grievances into the language of human
rights.
That Armenians themselves identified their human rights with their rights as a
nation raised few eyebrows. As a Polish socialist living in Paris observed wryly,
the narrative of national liberation was trumps in Western Europe. Thus Belgians
identified the struggle of Turkey’s subject peoples with their own fight against
the Dutch in 1830. Italians had analogous associations, the “Garibaldians of Bologna” invoking their hero’s name at pro-Armenian rallies. And the French always
packaged national and individual rights together as precious inheritances of the
Revolution: “No wonder, then, that the French masses demand today an armed
intervention to protect the Armenians against the [Ottoman] Kurds.”16 That Armenians no longer constituted a majority in historic Armenia (not least thanks to
the massacres that had reduced and dispersed them, but also, after 1912–13,
because of the influx of hundreds of thousands of Balkan Muslims, expelled
during the First and Second Balkan Wars) was a negligible difficulty for a public
long used to writing off the Ottoman Empire as an anachronism, and for whom
Turks, Kurds, Circassians, and the other Muslims populating eastern Anatolia
were shadowy presences, claiming attention only when they were killing Christians.
In Germany, however, a narrative favorable to the Armenians did not succeed
in crowding out alternatives. Their cause, as the same Polish socialist noted, failed
to attract the Left, whose press often treated reports of massacres with skepticism.
German comrades had their own story line, one that told them that they did not
have a dog in this fight. As late as October 1915, after learning that some 800,000
Armenians had been slaughtered over the previous six months, the Social Democratic editor Max Grunwald could argue that “in judging [the Armenian situation] one must observe Marx’s guiding principle that historical development
moves according to its own laws. If one wanted to apply European concepts of
morality and politics to Turkish conditions, one would arrive at a completely
distorted judgment.”17
The dismissal of “European concepts of morality” as inapplicable to Turkey
was not confined to the followers of Marx. The liberal orientalist C. H. Becker,
founder of the journal Der Islam and later minister of culture in the Weimar
Republic, invoked the same argument after he learned the “horrifying details” of
the fate of the Armenians from former students stationed in Anatolia during the
war: “Never forget that in Turkey we do not have a Rechtsstaat with an educated
population and effective state authority; we stand here, rather, on Asiatic soil,
where European culture and the discipline of a European state are only slowly
16
Elehard Esse [Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz], “La politique internationale du prolétariat et
la question d’Orient,” Le Devenir Social 4, nos. 7–8 (Jul.–Aug. 1898): 565–89, esp. 567–
69, 574, quote on 569. Garibaldi was invoked at rallies in Milan, April 26, and Rome,
May 7, 1903: Pour l’Arménie, 138, 141, 175, 186.
17
Quoted in “Auszug aus dem Vortrage des Dr. Johannes Lepsius vom 5.10.15 über die
Lage der Türkischen Armenier,” Oberzensurstelle des Kriegspresseamts, Nov. 1, 1915, fol.
51, Ernst Jäckh Papers, Yale University Library (hereafter Jäckh-YU).
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setting down roots.” Turkey would eventually “have to give up many Asiatic
governmental practices” before Germans could consider it their moral and cultural
equal, but for now Germany must, without flinching, stay the course that its
interests prescribed: alliance with the Ottomans. Once the war was over, it would
be Germany’s task “to raise Turkey culturally, so that a repeat of such events will
be impossible.”18 (Dying in February 1933, Becker was spared the ultimate challenge to his Orientalist explanation for genocide.)
The argument from cultural relativism continues to be the indispensable apology for murderous regimes. Whether and when it will be employed, however,
depends upon whose culture is being relativized—and on preferences growing
out of narratives more geopolitical than developmental. Thus, in 1896 when the
twenty-five-year-old Rosa Luxemburg, then a student in Zurich, submitted a
three-part article to Vorwärts, Social Democracy’s premier daily, demanding that
the party “declare itself without reserve for the Armenian cause,” its editor, Wilhelm Liebknecht, rejected it, invoking not Marx’s theory of historical development but a narrative with an even older pedigree on the German Left.19 The Grand
Old Man of German Social Democracy, who had won his spurs in the 1848
revolution and cofounded the Second International, sympathized with all repressed humans, classes, and peoples, he averred. But Liebknecht, alert to the
tsarist threat, wanted the young lady to get her priorities straight: “Fräulein Rosa
Luxenburg”—Liebknecht managed to misspell Luxemburg’s name three different
ways in the same piece—“who is, after all, a Pole, would perhaps find a more
fruitful field if she occupied herself with the Russian atrocities in Poland, and in
Russia itself. Then she would not run the danger of unintentionally serving the
interests of the bulwark of European absolutism.”20
Given these priorities, Vorwärts was not being inconsistent when, after violence
erupted between Azerbaijanis and Armenians in the Caucasus in 1905, it published an Armenian appeal that accused tsarist forces of deliberately arming the
18
“Horrifying details”: Becker to Jäckh, Aug. 27, 1915, NL C[arl] H[einrich] Becker,
fol. 2059, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (hereafter GStA PK). “Never
forget” etc. in C. H. Becker, “Armenier, Türken, und Wir,” ibid., fol. 7836. Thanks to
military censors, the piece remained unpublished. One of Becker’s most gifted students,
by then a lieutenant in the Fourth Turkish Army, Tenth Division, conceded that one must
“measure things [here] with other standards” but could not suppress his horror. Hellmut
Ritter [brother of the historian Gerhard Ritter] to Becker, Sept. 15, 1915, ibid., fol. 3521.
19
Luxemburg’s “Die nationalen Kämpfe in der Türkei und die Sozialdemokratie,” in
three parts, had already been published in the Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung, nos. 234, 235,
and 236, Oct. 8, 9, and 10, 1896; Luxemburg, GW 1, pt. 1:57–60, 60–63, 63–68. August
Bebel apparently shared Luxemburg’s views, debating Friedrich Naumann at a Christian
Social rally in Berlin. Wilhelm van Kampen, “Studien zur Deutschen Türkeipolitik in der
Zeit Wilhelms II.” (PhD diss., University of Kiel, 1968), 120.
20
“Erklärung,” Vorwärts, no. 265, Nov. 11, 1896. Liebknecht’s position was first revealed in Hermann Goltz, “Pfarrer D. Dr. Johannes Lepsius (1858–1926)—Helfer und
Anwalt des Armenischen Volkes,” in Internationales Dr. Johannes-Lepsius-Symposium,
ed. Hermann Goltz (Halle/Saale, 1986), 19–52, 39–40. Luxemburg had only sarcasm for
the septuagenarian’s proof texts: conversations with Marx and the “genius” David Urquhart
during the Crimean War, forty years earlier. “Zur Orientpolitik,” in GW 1, pt. 1:71.
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“fanatic and ignorant hordes of the Mohammedan race,” inciting them to “indescribable atrocities.” This was a conflict that fit Social Democracy’s tried-andtrue anti-Russian story. Vorwärts’ confidence in assigning blame in the Caucasus,
however, did not mean that it was ready to pass judgment in Anatolia. Thus in
1918 it obligingly reprinted a declaration from the Ottoman wire service describing what was happening in Turkish Armenia as a “civil war.”21
An analogous geopolitical narrative—this time with England rather than Russia as the villain—was invoked by Germany’s Liberals in dismissing demands
that the Reich exert pressure on behalf of Armenians. Employing the same “objectively/subjectively” distinction beloved of Marxist casuists, a popular Left Liberal leader argued at his party’s national congress in 1899 that “a position friendly
to Armenians . . . means, in reality, supporting—however little one might intend
it—England’s expansionist politics.”22 He was not alone in suspecting the Armenians of being—objectively, of course—allies of England. The Liberal press
buzzed with such extenuations. And Hellmut von Gerlach, a scion of Junker
aristocrats who would spend much of his life recycling in various autobiographies
the heroic story of his journey from “Right to Left,” dutifully registering (in 1937)
his revulsion at the carnage that confronted him on a trip to Constantinople in
1896, argued in 1898 at a Left Liberal Party congress against taking any position
on the Armenians, those clients of England. Like many who hankered after a
greater German role in Asia Minor, Gerlach preferred instead a policy toward
Turkey that “improves the lot of our own people.”23
Analogous considerations, buttressed by his own futuristic narrative, inspired
Theodor Herzl’s enthusiastic response (“excellent!”) to an overture in 1896 by an
agent of Abdul Hamid II suggesting that he marshal “Jewish power” on the sultan’s behalf, especially in the Armenian matter.24 In a year when European sympathy for the Armenians was at its height and pressure on the Ottoman padishah
was intense, Herzl used all his contacts, as Zionist leader and as newspaperman,
to turn the tide. He began at the top, with a scheme to persuade Lord Salisbury
to compel the Armenians to accept a reconciliation with the sultan on the latter’s
terms. As an Austrian, he also tried to influence his own foreign minister.25 A
21
“Aufruf der armenischen Sozialisten,” Vorwärts, no. 140, June 18, 1905; “Bürgerkrieg
in Armenien: Türkische Anschuldigungen,” ibid., no. 110, April 22, 1918.
22
Friedrich Naumann, quoted in Theodor Heuß, Friedrich Naumann: Der Mann, das
Werk, die Zeit, 2nd printing (Stuttgart, 1937), 122.
23
Von Rechts nach Links (Zurich, 1937), 128–30. Quote in Uwe Feigel, Das evangelische Deutschland und Armenien: Armenierhilfe deutscher evangelischer Christen seit
dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts im Kontext der deutsch-türkischen Beziehungen (Göttingen, 1989), 89.
24
Theodor Herzl, diary entry, May 7, 1896, Zionistisches Tagebuch: 1895–99, ed. Johannes Wachten and Chaya Harel, vol. 2 of Briefe und Tagebücher (hereafter BT), ed.
Alex Bein et al., 7 vols. (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1983–), 2:338–40. Herzl’s engagement was first reported by Marwan R. Buheiry, in “Theodor Herzl and the Armenian
Question,” Journal of Palestine Studies 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 75–97, and investigated
further by Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide
(Tel Aviv, 1995; London, 2000).
25
Efforts to enlist Salisbury: entries, May 11, 12, 1896, BT 2:341; Herzl to Max Nordau,
May 11, 1896, and to Solomon Joseph Solomon, May 12, 1896, BT 4:101, 593; Herzl to
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second prong of his attack was an approach to Armenian exile leaders, whom he
hoped to shepherd “back into the [Ottoman] pen.” An Armenian insurrection was
rumored for July, and the sultan wanted Herzl to get them to “submit without
condition,” after which he would spontaneously grant all the reforms he deemed
“possible.”26 Herzl sent a secret emissary to meet with Armenian committees in
Paris, Brussels, and London. He personally sought out the founder of the revolutionary Hintschaks in London and conferred with a Tbilisi Armenian leader in
Vienna. A permanent peace was not part of the agenda. Herzl was acutely conscious that his leverage with the sultan would evaporate once Armenians ceased
to be a threat, while Abdul Hamid himself wanted an armistice only to buy time
to marshal his forces. All was very hugger-mugger: “Under no circumstances are
the Armenians to learn that we want to use them in order to erect a Jewish state.”27
But the wary Armenians kept Herzl at arm’s length.
Less fanciful were Herzl’s efforts to influence the press. Abdul Hamid’s precondition for the audience that the Zionist leader wanted to jump-start his Palestine project was Herzl’s success in persuading newspapers “in London, Paris,
Berlin, and Vienna to treat the Armenian question in a manner more friendly to
the Turks.” Herzl declared himself ready “à me mettre en campagne.” Proposing
to “create an atmosphere” receptive to the “submission of the Armenians,” he
promised not only to contact journalists throughout Europe but also to produce a
series of articles in Vienna’s leading daily, his own Neue Freie Presse, on his
favorable impressions of Constantinople’s ruling circles. A puff piece appeared
the next day. Herzl gave interviews to the correspondents of Novosti and other
Russian papers, to Israel Zangwill for the Sunday Times, and to Lucien Wolf,
foreign affairs editor of the Daily Graphic.28 The latter nearly blew Herzl’s cover
by asking about a rumor that the sultan was angling for Jewish support against
the Armenians in return for benevolence toward Herzl’s plans for Palestine. The
“new Moses” indignantly denied it.29
Philipp Michael de Newlinski, May 13, 15, 1896, BT 2:341–42, 343; entry, July 9, 1896,
BT 2:398. Approach via the Austrian ambassador: entry, July 25, 1896, BT 2:381.
26
Herzl to Nordau, May 11, 1896, and to Solomon, May 12, 1896: BT 4:100, quotes
on 104; and entry, June 22, 1896, BT 2:375.
27
Herzl to Nordau, and, similarly, to Solomon, May 11, 12, 1896, BT 4:101, 104. Contacts with Armenians: Herzl to Newlinski (two letters), May 15, 1896, BT 2:343–44;
Zaikowski to Simon Lvovich Klatschko, May 30, 1896, BT 2:847–48; entries, May 13,
31, July 1, 2, 11, 13, 15, 1896, BT 2:342, 349–50, 390, 399–400, 402–3, 406. M. Şükrü
Hanioğlu shows Young Turks manipulating Herzl (with only brief success) in a similar
fashion, with “plots proposed” that “rivaled those in the most unrealistic spy novels.”
Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford, 2001), 62.
28
Quote: entry, June 22, 1896, BT 2:374–76. See also Herzl to Nordau, May 11, 1896,
and to Solomon, May 12, 1896, BT 4:100–101, 103–4; entries, June 24, 25, 26, July 5,
11, 1896, BT 2:376, 379, 381, 382–83, 393, 399. According to Auron, Herzl also talked
up the sultan with the Daily Mail: “Jüdische, zionistische und israelische Reaktionen auf
den Völkermord an den Armeniern,” in Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah/
The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller
(Zurich, 2002), 570–91, 590 n. 2.
29
Herzl continued to treat Wolf as a co-conspirator, asking on July 10, 1896: “Is the
89
Thus at the very time that England, France, and Russia were pressing Abdul
Hamid to accept reforms, Herzl offered him a way out via “our [i.e., Jewish]
power.” How? “The sultan gives us the piece of land, and for that we will put
everything in order for him, regulate his finances, and determine public opinion
of the entire world in his favor.”30 Herzl had already taken the Ottoman debt to
heart. By enlisting “our money people,” he proposed to get rid of the “shaming”
European Control Commission and turn interest payments on the Ottoman debt
over to a Jewish directorate, who would enable the sultan to borrow “ad libitum.”
Various Rothschilds (Edmund James and Nathanial Meyer) were approached, as
were Claude Montefiore and Sir Samuel Montagu. A loan of 2 million pounds
sterling, supplemented by yearly increments of 1 million, leading to a total credit
of 20 million was mentioned. But talk’s cheap. And in the midst of all of it came
new “horror stories.” Fresh massacres, this time in Constantinople before the eyes
of European diplomats and businessmen, were the sultan’s retaliation for the
seizure of the Ottoman Bank by Armenian revolutionaries. “The impression on
the world is deplorable,” Herzl admitted. The financiers on whom he had pinned
his hopes, “the Englishman Montagu, etc.,” would probably refuse anything connected with Abdul Hamid. “On the other hand, though,” he noted brightly, “it
would be a very favorable moment to negotiate with the sultan, because he will
be hard put to get money from anyone now.”31
Herzl did not lack information about what was going down in Turkey, far away.
During his interview with the grand vizier, their interpreter had offered “pleasantly” (apparently in response to Herzl’s alarmed query about a massacre in Van)
that “it was nothing—only a couple of hundred deaths.” That fall, Herzl heard a
detailed account of the Constantinople bloodbath from an eyewitness.32 But geopolitics remained trumps. In 1901, it dictated a flattering telegram wired to the
sultan by the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel, only three months after fresh pogroms in Sasun and Mush.33 The gesture outraged Armenian students in Geneva
and Lausanne, as well as their Bulgarian, Polish, Russian, Macedonian, Georgian,
and Jewish classmates, who telegraphed their indignation to Herzl. The protests
were then published in Paris’s Pro Arménia. The Fifth Zionist Congress’s telegram excited the particular ire of Bernard Lazare. Himself once a Zionist, Lazare
was scandalized that no one in Basel had objected to this salute to a “sultan
covered with the blood of others.”34 Although embarrassing, for Herzl the flap
Armenian matter progressing?” BT 4:117. A German translation of the fawningly prosultan Daily Graphic interview, in which Herzl also disingenuously conveyed the impression that he had already been given an audience with Abdul Hamid: BT 4:597–600.
30
“Unsere Machtmittel.” Entry, June 9, 1896, BT 2:352–54.
31
Entry, Aug. 29, 1896, BT 2:437.
32
Entries, June 24, 25, Aug. [sic; he means Sept.] 29 (“Schreckensnachrichten”), and
Oct. 24, 1896, BT 2:379, 381, 437, 461–62.
33
Entry, Dec. 19, 1901; Herzl to sultan, Dec. 20, 1901, and to Grand Vizier Ibrahim
Bey, Dec. 25, 1901; entry, Jan. 5, 1902. All in BT 3:322–24. The telegram is reprinted in
BT 6:388.
34
“Le Congress Sioniste et le Sultan,” Pro Arménia, no. 4, Jan. 1902, 29–30, cited in
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Anderson
was not without its consolations: “This may do me good with the sultan,” he
noted.35 The young Chaim Weizmann, leader of the Zionists’ Democratic Faction,
which counted Martin Buber, now a Berliner and one of the delegates to Basel,
among its members, hastened to organize rallies to denounce the anti-Herzl outcry
as dishonoring the Jewish people. The declarations in Pro Arménia against the
Zionist Congress’s telegram were reprinted in Genveaux, the journal of the Genevan Radical Party. Weizmann’s counterattack was published in Leopold Sonnemann’s left liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the most influential papers in
Germany, thus ensuring its publicity among an important sector of the German
public.36
It is difficult to gauge how far Herzl’s exertions affected (or reflected) opinion
in Germany. Herzl’s Neue Freie Presse was a feeder journal for much of the
German-language press, especially on matters Ottoman, since it was one of the
few papers to have its own correspondent in the Turkish capital. Even the Catholic
press relied on “the great Viennese Jewish paper” for much of its news of the
Orient.37 Yet reporting on Ottoman matters from the Neue Freie Press was mixed
(the sultan himself had complained of it), and Zionism had captured the allegiance
of a relatively small number of German-speaking Jews. Nevertheless, the contrast
between Jewish spokesmen in France, Britain, and the United States, including
those sympathetic to Zionism, and their Central European counterparts is striking.38 The former were noticeably engaged in Armenian human rights, while two
of Herzl’s earliest German associates, Davis Trietsch and Dr. Alfred Nossig—
although they eventually broke with him on the ways and means of colonizing
Palestine—would also employ their talents in the Turkish cause.39 Nossig went
Auron, Banality, 104–7. Geneva was at that time a center not only of Armenian but also
of Young Turk and Arab activity. M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition
(Oxford, 1995), 159.
35
Entries, Jan. 5 (quote) and 9, 1902, BT 3:326.
36
Auron, Banality, 108–11.
37
Edmund Jörg’s two-part article, “Die drei aktiven Mächte in Sachen Armeniens: Die
‘armenischen Gräuel’ insbesondere,” cited the Neue Freie Presse eighteen times, more
than any other newspaper: Historisch-Politische Blätter 116 (Sept. 12, 1895): 453–71, and
116 (Oct. 23, 1895): 690–706, 706.
38
In London, Israel Zangwill wrote: “I take the Crown of Thorns from Israel’s brow
and place it upon Armenia’s.” Quoted in Goltz, “Lepsius,” 46–47. One of Herzl’s associates, Moses Gaster, felt the need to mollify the sultan about the Jewish press in England’s
criticism of his treatment of the Armenians. BT 4:608, n. 827. In the United States, Rabbi
Stephen S. Wise, Jacob Schiff, and Oscar S. Straus were active on behalf of Armenians,
and in 1909 a resolution was passed by the Central Conference of American Rabbis calling
on the Great Powers to protect Armenians from “Turkish barbarism.” Merrill D. Peterson,
“Starving Armenians”: America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1930 and after (Charlottesville, VA, 2004), 58, 99, 147; Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and America’s Response (New York, 2003), xvi.
39
From the first, Nossig supported Herzl in the Armenian matter: Herzl to Nordau, May
11, 1896, BT 4:101. Later, Nossig’s writings praised the architects of the genocide: Die
Neue Türkei und Ihre Führer (Halle/Saale, 1916); “Ein türkischer Staatsmann,” Berliner
Lokal-Anzeiger, no. 606, Nov. 27, 1915 (on Talât Bey); “Enver Pascha (Die Reform der
91
so far, in 1915, as to urge the American ambassador to Constantinople, Henry
Morgenthau, “as one Jew to another,” to abandon his efforts on behalf of the
Armenians.40 The exhortation echoed an earlier appeal to Jewish identity by
Chaim Weizmann, after the revisionist Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein had
spoken out for the Armenians at a workingman’s rally. Weizmann reproved Bernstein for campaigning on behalf of the Armenians when he should have been
championing the cause of the Jews.41
I am not suggesting that no one within these milieus—German-speaking Zionists, Social Democratic editors, Liberal scholars, journalists, and politicians—
felt a twinge of compassion when they heard of mass murder down in Turkey far
away. Luxemburg and Bernstein are evidence to the contrary. But as a group,
Germans on the Left responded differently from their counterparts abroad. Later,
I will try to explain the German difference. For now, it is enough to note that
they were all answering the Chinese Mandarin Question (let us now rename it
the Armenian Peasant Question) in the manner not of Chateaubriand but of Balzac.
The Armenians found only one constituency in Germany willing to provide
them with sustained publicity and succor. These were Christians—but Christians
of a particular kind. Catholics kept a low profile. Their national bishops’ conference did institute a nationwide collection, and a Cologne rally, graced by two
bishops and three leaders of the Center Party, attracted a crowd of several thousand. Catholic newspapers usually reported Armenian suffering sympathetically
and tended (unlike much of the German press) to relay official Ottoman accounts
with caution. But the tone was sober, and solutions, if any, were left to the British.42 As for the papers of the mainstream Protestant church, their reporting initially reflected shifting points of view and degrees of engagement. Christliche
Welt, published by the liberal theologian Martin Rade, did consistently champion
the victims, but its subscribers were relatively few.43
türkischen Armee),” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 33. Jg., n.d. [1915], fols. 45, 42, Jäckh-YU.
Trietsch pooh-poohed the massacres of the 1890s in Die Juden der Türkei, Länder und
Völker der Türkei, ed. Hugo Grothe, no. 8 (Leipzig, 1915), 20.
40
Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (New York, 1918; Ann Arbor, MI,
2000), 251–52. Morgenthau describes Nossig as a German agent, but he was in fact acting
on behalf of the Jewish colonization committee of Berlin. Initially unknown to bemused
German diplomats, Nossig eventually gained the support of some embassy and Foreign
Office personnel: E. W. Fürst zu Hohenlohe to Bethmann Hollweg, Sept. 2, 1915, in AAI
Türkei 159, no. 1, secr., “Der Sultan und seine Familie,” vol. 1, R 13785; Isaiah Friedman,
Germany, Turkey, and Zionism, 1897–1918 (Oxford, 1977), 263–64.
41
Weizmann to Vera Khatzman, Aug. 9, 1902, Weizmann Letters, 22, cited in Auron,
Banality, 111.
42
This judgment is based upon a reading of two years of Germania and scattered issues
of other Catholic papers, all of which I owe to Chris Nickerson. Collection and rally: “Die
Protestversammlung gegen die türkischen Greuel in Armenien,” Germania, no. 226, Sept.
30, 1896, 2. Blatt: 1–2.
43
Its 5,000 subscriptions circulated widely, however, via reading groups. Axel Meißner,
“Martin Rades ‘Christliche Welt’ und Armenien: Bausteine für eine internationale politis-
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Anderson
The core constituency for Armenian human rights lay elsewhere, with people
whom Germans loosely call “awakened” (and Americans, even more loosely,
“fundamentalists”): men and women whose religious sensibility and belief in the
verbal inspiration of the Bible put them closer to the Anglo-American holiness
movement that later fed into pentacostalism than to their contemporaries within
the Wilhelmine Protestant establishment, ecclesiastical and academic.44 Not a few
were millenarians, and thus part of a broader international Protestant impulse,
connected to each other and committed to evangelizing activity—from street
preaching in Copenhagen to mission stations in India—in anticipation of the
Second Coming.45
Such were the foot soldiers of the movement for Armenian relief in Germany:
the men and women who organized rallies, who took up collections for clinics
and orphanages (amassing well over 600,000 marks by January 1897), who
“adopted” children and paid the salaries of doctors and nurses.46 They were to be
found in churches as often as auditoriums, their ushers wearing the red armbands
of the YMCA, their meetings opening with a hymn, closing with a prayer. Their
publications reached broad audiences: Auf der Warte, for example, claimed an
astonishing 50,000 subscribers. These were the people who brought events in
Anatolia to the attention of the mainstream Protestant religious press, which eventually joined the cause.47
While most Germans had difficulty discerning the story into which Turks and
Armenians fit, evangelicals had no trouble making sense of what they heard,
slotting these new horrors into traditional Christian narratives of suffering: Armenians, whose nation was the first to choose Christ (301 CE), were martyrs;
Abdul Hamid II was a new Diocletian, a second Nero.48 Especially for Germans
che Ethik des Protestantismus” (theology diss., University of Halle-Wittenburg, 2001), 69,
95, 102. Meißner’s is a work of fundamental importance and will be published as vol. 22
in Studien zur Orientalischen Kirchengeschichte.
44
Jörg Ohlemacher, “Gemeinschaftschristentum in Deutschland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Der Pietismus im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, ed. Ulrich Gäbler (Göttingen, 2000), 393–465. The Fellowship Movement, whose networks supplied
much of the energy behind armenophile activism in Germany, was influenced theologically
by Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith. Hannah’s (continuing) international
best-seller, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (New York, 1870), appeared in German
in 1893.
45
E.g., Otto Eckelmann, India, to Johannes Lepsius, April 14, Nov. 19, 1896; H. L.
Larsen, Copenhagen, to Lepsius, Jan. 31, 1897. Both in Johannes-Lepsius-Archiv-Halle
(hereafter LAH), microfiche edition compiled by Hermann Goltz and Axel Meißner, NC
9, 8, 200.
46
Lepsius, “Die Armenierhetze,” Die Zukunft 5, no. 18, Jan. 30, 1897, 218–22, 222.
47
Issues of Auf der Warte are in GStA PK I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 343a, no. 177. Excellent
on the strands of Protestant engagement: Feigel, Das evangelische Deutschland.
48
Nero and Diocletian: “Eine große Kundgebung gegen die Greuel in Armenien,” Der
Reichsbote, no. 214, Sept. 11, 1896, suppl. 2; Bergische Landeszeitung, no. 78, Sept. 26,
1896; Kirchliche Korrespondenz für die Mitglieder des Evangelisches Bundes 10 (1896),
714–15; Deutsche Evangelische Kirchenzeitung 10 (1896), 357. The first two are in GStA
PK I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 343a; no. 177; the latter two, quoted in Feigel, Das evangelische
Deutschland, 52 n. 15, 53 n. 21. A cornucopia of Christian tropes: “Gedenkt Armenien,”
93
living near Berlin, the incendiary Nero was a vivid figure. During the 1880s a
popular panorama depicting the Roman emperor’s human torches, wrapped like
mummies in pitch, had kept crowds aghast.49 The immolation of so many Armenians inside their churches made the parallel seem self-evident, as did reports
of crucifixions.
Christians knew that the faithful might be called on to make the ultimate sacrifice, and the nineteenth century had driven the point home, with the deaths of
40,000 Vietnamese Catholics in the 1880s and 350,000 Chinese Christians in the
Taiping civil war.50 The mass “conversions” to Islam at sword’s point in the
pogrom-swept villages of Anatolia underlined the message that these “brothers
and sisters” were victims of religious persecution.51 On remedies, opinion was
divided. One pastor alluded enviously to the spirit of the Crusades; another expressed the hope that the sultan’s attempt to drive Christians from Turkish soil
would end with the Turks being driven out of Europe; still others rejected any
action except prayer as encroaching on the prerogatives of the Almighty. None
had any doubt, however, that there was meaning in the Armenian agony. As Pastor
Johannes Lepsius, the charismatic leader of the movement, assured his audience,
“The frightful suffering of a Christian people is itself a sign that the day is not
far off when the reign of Christianity will begin. The days of Islam are numbered.”52
II. THE TURCOPHILE COUNTERNARRATIVE
The identity that Germany’s pietists professed with their “brothers and sisters”
down in Turkey far away did not make the Armenian cause more attractive to
Grüneberger Anzeiger [Hessen], no. 102, Dec. 19, 1856, 1. Blatt, 1. Catholic papers usually
steered clear of playing the religious identity card. An illuminating analysis of a similar
dynamic inflecting American receptivity to massacres of Armenians, as opposed to (for
example) those of Congolese: Leonard, “When News Is Not Enough,” 303–6.
49
Panorama: Theodor Fontane, Die Poggenpuhls: Die Welt des Adels; Familienromane
(published serially 1895–96; republished by Aufbau Taschenbuch, n.p., n.d.), 67.
50
Thanks to Frederic E. Wakeman for figures on the Taiping civil war and to J. P.
Daughton for steering me to David Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 (Berkeley, 1971), 45–47, and Simon Delacroix, ed., Histoire universelle des Missions Catholiques, vol. 3, Les Missions Contemporaines (1800–1957) (Paris, 1957), 85–86; Delacroix
puts Christian losses in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 at 200,000. Massacre figures are
always estimates; thus Eduard Bernstein estimates Lebanon/Damascus losses at 60,000 in
Die Leiden des Armenischen Volkes und die Pflichten Europas: Rede gehalten in einer
Berliner Volksversammlung (Berlin, 1902), 16. The larger the numbers, the more contested
the responsibility, as Lebanon shows. Cf. Caesar E. Farah, The Politics of Interventionism
in Ottoman Lebanon, 1830–1861 (London, 2000), esp. 554–602.
51
Jünglingsverein der freien evang. Kirche Deutschlands (Breslau), to Lepsius, Oct. 15,
1896, LAH, NC 16.
52
Crusader envy: “Vortrag über Armenien,” Bergische Landeszeitung, Oct. 3, 1896.
Expelling the Turks: report on rallies in Barmen by Polizeikommissar Schulze, Jan. 14,
1897. Lepsius quoted in “Eine große Kundgebung gegen die Greuel in Armenien,” Der
Reichsbote, Sept. 11, 1896. Prayer alone: Robert Kusch (Breslau) to Lepsius, Sept. 1,
1896, LAH, NC 130.
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Anderson
those of other persuasions. Indeed, it opened a door through which turcophile
writers launched their own campaign, one that did not scruple to set armenophile
narratives boldly on their head. To reports of slaughtered Armenians, naysayers
served up a narrative of Muslim tolerance. To depictions of Ottoman corruption
and backwardness, they touted the sultan’s reforms—a trope that after the regime
change of 1908 morphed into Young Turk “modernity.” They countered demands
for self-determination by damning the Armenians as agents of imperialism: cat’spaws for France, Russia, and especially England, whose tears for Armenians,
ignoring Muslim victims of Christian brutality, revealed Albion’s typically selfserving double standard. First off the mark was the journalist Hans Barth, with
an over-the-top lampoon of the Armenian rights movement that appeared in Die
Zukunft, a weekly journal of opinion whose satirical sparkle made it must reading
for all sophisticated Germans with claims to being in the know. Entitled “Turk
Baiting,” and soon expanded into a book, Turk, Defend Yourself! Barth’s piece
rang the changes on a turcophile narrative that would persist in Germany for at
least two decades.53
Barth’s great insight was to recognize that in responding to faraway events,
people brought their identities (and alterities) with them. Thus he opened with a
full-bore attack on the armenophiles themselves. His theme? Those Christians
are at it again! The same crowd who gave us the sack of Constantinople in 1204,
the Spanish Inquisition, the conquistadors, Cesare Borgia, the Puritans and British
hypocrisy (with their offshoots, General Booth and his ridiculous Salvation
Army)—plus today’s atrocities in the Philippines and the Congo: these folks are
now whipping up another “crusade”—this time against Islam.
Logically, Barth’s diatribe left everything to be desired. What Lepsius’s pious
Protestants, who hated the pope almost as much as the devil, had to do with the
Spanish Inquisition (for example) was anybody’s guess. Tactically, however, it
was brilliant. The topoi of the Christian fanatic, the pious Tartuffe, the meddling
“missionaries” tapped into one of the most deeply felt issues of the day, Germany’s long-running culture wars, the acrimonious quarrel between religion and
secular modernity. Playing upon progressive Germany’s allergic reaction to the
specter of “clerical politics,” Barth’s identification of the campaign for Armenian
human rights as a “crusade,” with a genealogy reaching back to the twelfth century, was designed to make it easy for the very stratum that in other countries
joined the churches in pressing for international intervention to hesitate in Germany, for fear of being manipulated for unsavory clerical ends.54 Even more
53
“Die Türkenhetze,” Die Zukunft 5, no. 16 (Jan. 16, 1897), 130–32; Türke, Wehre
Dich! 2nd printing (Leipzig, 1898).
54
“Die achte Kreuzzug,” the title of part 1 of Barth’s book, punned on the archaic
spelling for echt (genuine) and conventions in German historiography that numbered medieval Crusades at seven, encouraging an eschatological and numerological tradition that
suggested that eight (achte) would bring a final, apocalyptic victory. Thanks to Geoffrey
Koziol for this information. After the war, “Der achte Kreuzzug” was the title of lectures
to raise money for Armenian relief sponsored by Lepsius’s organization. Telegram from
1925, LAH, NC 1448-14621. Labeling interventionist demands a European “crusade” was
95
tellingly, by dubbing Armenophile efforts a “crusade” and Pastor Lepsius a “vestpocket Torquemada,” Barth slyly encouraged his readers to associate the movement for Armenian human rights with the West’s long centuries of antisemitism.
Easy to make, the insinuation was difficult to disprove. But in fact the missionary movement whose organizations provided the delivery system for Armenian relief has recently been credited with having offered Germany’s most vigorous opposition to the new political antisemitism. Familiarity with Hebrew texts
led its theologians to attack charges of ritual murder leveled against Jews as
ignorant nonsense; a proselytizing agenda encouraged closer contacts with real
Jews and, ultimately, what one historian has described as genuine “philosemitism.”55 Missionaries pinned eschatological hopes on the success of Zionism,
greeting the twenty-two new agricultural colonies in Palestine as a “miracle” that
signaled the fulfillment of scripture—an interpretation Herzl himself was pleased
to exploit.56 Lepsius, who welcomed Zionism both because it was the precondition
for the conversion of Israel prophesied by Paul and because the Jewish people
had a legitimate right to a national existence, immediately and credibly rejected
the slur of antisemitism.57
Nevertheless, however contrived it was for Barth to reduce the Protestant establishment to (in Lepsius’s rebuke) “a society of antisemites,” it is unlikely that
the communities who supplied the heart and muscle of the armenophile movement
were exempt from the negative assumptions about Jews so common in contema favorite ploy of Abdul Hamid and, later, the Young Turks. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a
Revolution, 303. Herzl tried the same line with the Austrian ambassador to Constantinople,
who retorted that if there were any crusade in Turkey, it was the Crescent’s against the
Cross. Entry, July 25, 1896, BT 2:381.
55
Alan T. Levenson, “Missionary Protestants and the Defense of Judaism,” in Between
Philosemitism and Antisemitism: Defenses of Jews and Judaism in Germany, 1871–1932
(Lincoln, NE, 2004), 60–90, esp. 66, 76. Earlier Lutheran and Anglican evangelicals had
defended Damascan Jews against ritual murder charges. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus
Affair: ‘Ritual Murder,’ Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge, 1997), 284–310, 261.
56
“Cäsarea,” Auf der Warte, Der Freiwillige, no. 5, suppl., GStA PK I. HA Rep. 77, Tit.
343a; no. 177. Herzl’s attempts to enmesh the London Baptist preacher Dr. John Clifford
and the Rev. William H. Hechler, chaplain at the British embassy in Vienna, in his antiArmenian intrigues: entries, May 11, 12, July 13, 1896, BT 2:341, 401. Hechler, author
of The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine according to the Prophets (1882), attended the
First Zionist Congress, as did the sultan’s agent on the Armenian matter. “It will be one
of my tasks,” Herzl wrote, “to keep them from seeing too much of each other.” Quoted in
Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York, 1972), 99.
57
“Die Armenierhetze,” Die Zukunft 5, no. 18 (Jan. 30, 1897), 218–22. Barth’s reply
and Lepsius’s rebuttal: “Armenier und Türken,” ibid., 5, no. 23 (March 6, 1897), 477–78.
The charge of antisemitism, explicit in Barth’s article, was reduced to innuendo in his
book, perhaps because of German libel laws that favored plaintiffs. Lepsius on Zionism:
“Der Zionismus,” ChW 11 (1897), cols. 1015–19. In 1910, his Reich Christi published
“Israel, der Knecht Gottes, in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart,” by C. F. Hemann, secretary
of Basel’s Verein der Freunde Israel, whose praise of the Jewish people caused a fluttering
in theological dovecotes. Wolfgang Heinrichs, Das Judenbild im Protestantismus des
deutschen Kaiserreichs: Ein Beitrag zur Mentalitätsgeschichte des deutschen Bürgertums
in der Krise der Moderne (Cologne, 2000), 260 n. 793, 466 n. 44.
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Anderson
porary Germany.58 Moreover, although the journalist did not mention him by
name, many readers would have been aware that among those “dear pastors” on
whom Barth dripped his sarcasm was the former court preacher Adolf Stoecker,
famous to contemporaries and historians as the founder of the antisemitic Christian Social movement. At a time when much of the conservative press, anticipating the wishes of the Foreign Office, was finding excuses for the Armenian
massacres, or ignoring them, it was Stoecker who stuck his neck out by running
articles in his Deutsche Evangelische Kirchenzeitung on the killings. In 1897, he
stood up in Prussia’s House of Deputies and demanded that the interior minister
explain why he had put the kibosh on church collections for Armenian relief and
deported refugee speakers. More noteworthy, however, than the advocacy of
Stoecker (a man whose day had passed) should have been the fact—as a pastor
on the pacifist Left pointed out—that no other deputy, in any of Germany’s parliaments, including the Reichstag, had had the gumption to pose the same awkward questions.59
Unremarked by Barth, but even more compromising, was the presence of Paul
Förster on the podium at a mass rally for Armenians, sitting alongside two of the
most respected officials of the Protestant church. A man of no known religious
convictions, today Förster is remembered mainly, if he is remembered at all, as
the brother of Bernhard Förster, Wagnerian racial enthusiast, author of the antisemitic petition of 1881, founder of the Neu-Germania settlement in Paraguay,
and husband of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Like his brother, Paul Förster was a
lifelong swimmer in the sea of Germany’s antisemitic parties and organizations
and at the time of the rally was representing one of them in the Reichstag.60
I have found no other evidence connecting Förster to the armenophiles, and it
is hard to know what to make of his presence that evening. As the rally’s sole
Though not just Germany. The radical French journalist Lucien Millevoye, champion
of Irish nationalism, lover of Maud Gonne and father of her two children, who spoke
ardently for intervention on behalf of the Armenians during a session of the Chamber of
Deputies on March 10, 1903, devoted to that issue (Pour l’Arménie, 63–67), was also,
unlike most French armenophiles, an antisemite and important anti-Dreyfusard. Pierre
Birnbaum, The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898, trans. Jeanne-Marie Todd
(Paris, 1998; New York, 2003).
59
This was the complaint of the Stuttgart pastor and peace activist Otto Umfrid, who
dismissed Stoecker, although not by name, as a “political dead man.” Quoted in Helmut
Donat, afterword to Heinrich Vierbucher, Was die kaiserliche Regierung den deutschen
Untertanen verschwiegen hat: Armenien 1915; Die Abschlachtung eines Kulturvolkes
durch die Türken (1930; Bremen, 1985), 89–90. Stoecker had just been expelled by the
Conservatives as too leftist and forced out of the Evangelisch-Sozialer Kongress as too
conservative. His speech, “Thoumajian und die preussiche Regierung. Haus der Abgeordneten. 30. Sitzung am 11. February 1897,” in Aus der Arbeit: Beiblatt, cols. 188–89, LAH
Card 002, is described in Feigel, Das evangelische Deutschland, 77, 91, 92. Contrast the
efforts of Belgian and French deputies, including armenophiles, to dissuade their governments from banning the Young Turks’ organ Mesveret and from extraditing the Young
Turk leader Ahmed Rıza. Hanioğlu, Young Turks, 80–81, 111, 113, 294 n. 13.
60
Podium description from the Kreuzzeitung, cited by Norbert Saupp (“Das Deutsche
Reich und die armenische Frage 1878–1914” [PhD diss., University of Cologne, 1990],
129–30), who seems unaware of Förster’s identity and antisemitic affiliations.
58
97
Reichstag deputy, he was probably there for decoration, speaking roles being
confined to Lepsius and another parson. Anyone who has ever been mortified
during a political demonstration by the slogan on the T-shirt of a fellow marcher
may be reluctant as I to convict the armenophiles of guilt by association. Nevertheless, someone must have invited the man, and Förster’s presence on that
Berlin podium was bound to cast a damning shadow on the clerical worthies at
his side and on the cause they held dear.61
Barth did not rest with guilt by association. Contrasted with the specter of
reactionary Christian fanaticism was its mirror opposite and Barth’s second
theme: Progressive Turkey, or, as the inviting title of the second half of his book
put it, “The Turks as Kulturvolk.” Chapters on Turkey’s “National Awakening,”
on Abdul Hamid’s “Reforms,” on “The Modern Turkish Woman” hammered the
message home: modernity was on the march—especially in Turkey.62
Except for Barth’s extravagant praise of the sultan, all these tropes would appear again and again in the German press over the next decades: the Turkish
national “Renaissance”; the commitment to modernity, with reforms inspired by
German thinkers (Friedrich List) and German advisors (Generals Helmut von
Moltke and Colmar von der Goltz); and—much beloved by encomiasts, European
and Turkish alike—the new Turkish woman. (They don’t need a woman’s movement to deal with prostitution, illegitimacy, low wages, etc., because Turkish
women don’t become prostitutes and unwed mothers and Turkish wives don’t
work outside the home—though younger women are already claiming their right
to discard the veil.) I call them tropes because they were never altered by anything
new, least of all by new information.63
The linchpin of the turcophile counternarrative, joining its two parts—invective against the Christians and praise for the Turks—appeared in the title of
Barth’s central chapter: “A People of Tolerance.” The gist? When Christians had
been busy setting folks on fire, the Turks were the ones who in 1492 took in the
Jews.
“Tolerance” was the trope that trumped all tropes. References to 1492 occurred
61
The other speaker was Wilhelm Faber, a student of Franz Delitzsch, founder of Leipzig’s Institutum Judaicum. A man of a thousand enthusiasms, including the conversion of
Jewry, Faber may have been the one who invited Förster, since it is impossible to imagine
Lepsius recruiting the man. A revealing sketch of Faber, with whom Lepsius eventually
broke: Meißner, “Martin Rades ‘Christliche Welt,’” 167 n. 588.
62
Barth, Türke, 198, 265.
63
The “new woman” and her emancipation became a staple of turcophile propaganda.
Chap. 2 of Jäckh’s Der Aufsteigende Halbmond (various publishers, subtitles, editions,
and languages, from 1909 to 1944) was devoted to it. See also Jäckh, “Türkische Frauen,”
in Der Schwabenspiegel, no. 32, May 9, 1911, reprinted in “Lese,” Oct. 21, 1911; clippings
in Jäckh Papers, box 14, Butler Library, Columbia University (hereafter Jäckh-CU). The
Ottoman naval minister during World War I begins his memoirs with a paean to female
emancipation: Ahmed Djemal Pascha [Cemal Paşa], Memories of a Turkish Statesman,
1913–1919 (New York, 1922), 17–18. Similarly enduring is the trope that blames “missionaries” (read: tools of England) for interethnic violence. E.g., C. A. Bratter, Die armenische Frage (Berlin, 1915), 84; Jeremy Salt, Imperialism: Evangelism and the Ottoman
Armenians, 1878–1896 (London, 1993).
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Anderson
as regularly in turcophile journalism as invocations of the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July.64 When Eduard Bernstein addressed a rally of
workers in 1902 on behalf of the Armenians, he acknowledged the difficulties the
tolerance narrative posed for those trying to mobilize opinion to put pressure on
the Porte. In words that might have surprised Edward Said, Bernstein declared
that a “great prejudice reigns here in Europe in favor of Mohammedanism. Out
of opposition to what we have seen of Christianity in the course of history,” and
by comparing its deeds with certain events in Islamic lands, Europeans had
“drawn the conclusion that Mohammedanism has better precepts than Christianity
and, all things considered, is superior.”65
Bernstein was alluding to the nineteenth century’s idealized picture—propagated by romantics from Victor Hugo to Washington Irving—of a tolerant, pluralist, Islamic Spain that Ferdinand and Isabella had brought to a tragic end.66
Bernstein had no difficulty refuting the notion that Turkish “tolerance” was what
Europeans meant by the term, nor in demonstrating the irrelevance of the virtues
of medieval Iberia to current events on the Anatolian plateau. Yet the fact that he
found it necessary to do so suggests that Barth and his fellows knew what they
were about.
But even a polemicist as gifted as Hans Barth could not avoid the subject that
had, after all, necessitated such wide-ranging religio-historical reflections in the
first place: What about that slaughter down in Turkey far away? This brought
Barth to his third and considerably more ticklish theme: the Armenians themselves.
64
Jäckh never failed to repeat it. E.g., “Hie Kreuz—dort Halbmond,” Die Tat 8 (1912–
13), Jäckh-CU, box 14; similarly, Djemal’s Memories, 242–43; Bernard Lewis, What Went
Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (London, 2002), 33.
Turcophiles, then and now, accompanied these references with the (false) insistence that
1492 was something that “to be sure no one mentions today.” Quote: Barth, “Türkenhetze,”
132.
65
Die Leiden, 11. Cf. the orientalist Enno Littmann to C. H. Becker, Jan. 23, 1915:
“You spoke from my soul when you said ‘Islam is in theory the most intolerant, in practice
the most tolerant of religions.’” Its wars were “still more humane than most of the wars
to spread Christianity.” GStA PK, NL Becker, fol. 4579.
66
For the powerful Jewish contribution to this picture: Bernard Lewis, “The Pro-Islamic
Jews,” in Islam in History: Ideas, Men, and Events in the Middle East (London, 1973),
123–37. “The broad outlines of the story, in the simplified and dramatized form in which
great historic events so often reach the popular imagination, were well defined,” Lewis
noted. “The Jews had flourished in Muslim Spain, had been driven from Christian Spain,
and had found a refuge in Muslim Turkey.” Romanticism’s “cult of Spain,” the oversimple
contrast between a persecuting society in medieval Europe and a peaceable kingdom in
Islamic Iberia, was a “myth” that had been “invented by Jews in nineteenth century Europe
as a reproach to Christians” (135–36). See also Martin Kramer, ed., The Jewish Discovery
of Islam: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Tel Aviv, 1999); David Cesarani, “British
Jews,” in The Emancipation of Catholics, Jews, and Protestants: Minorities and the Nation
State in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Rainer Liedtke and Stephan Wendehorst (Manchester, 1999), 33–55, 50–51, 53; John M. Efron, “From Mitteleuropa to the Middle East:
Orientalism through a Jewish Lens,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 3 (Summer 2004):
490–520.
99
First of all, they were tools of John Bull, whose hand could be detected behind
all the brouhaha. The charge was tailor-made for the audience of Die Zukunft,
whose editor, Maximilian Harden, had made a career out of pillorying the German
Foreign Office for insufficient vigilance toward English expansion. This trope,
too, had legs. Armenians-as-tools-of-England (later, of the Entente) was soon
joined in the turcophile repertoire by a more generalized outcry against
“imperialism”—anti-imperialism appealing to the resentments of those who suspected that imperialism might be a great game they had come too late to play.
As for the recent unpleasantness? A “well-deserved ‘misfortune,’” Barth assured readers, brought on by the violence of Armenian tax resisters and terrorists.67 Embarrassed, perhaps, by the discrepancy between these revolutionaries’
pitiful efforts at propaganda of the deed and the retaliations wreaked on a whole
people, Barth then grasped the nettle of the victims’ national character. Armenians, he averred, were impossible not to dislike. In contrast to “The Turkish Peasantry: Core of the Nation” (another chapter title), these guys were usurers who
“plundered” their honest, hardworking Muslim neighbors. Pretty flimsy stuff, but
its appearance in Die Zukunft showed that serious people took it seriously. And
Barth’s philippic against the Armenians gained credibility from the fact that it
was joining a discourse that had existed before his intervention and would continue long after his own contribution had been forgotten.
This was a discourse that “essentialized” the Christian of the Near East. In one
strand, he was the born victim, whose cries for help we have become tired of
hearing. “Always beaten, always massacred, incapable of looking a warrior in the
face, perpetually offering his throat to the saber”: such was the characterization
by Ernest Renan (a central figure in Said’s indictment of Orientalism) of the
“eternal Christian of the Orient,” applied approvingly, by Die Zukunft’s editor, to
the Armenians.68 As Lepsius observed mordantly, for “a good part of our cultivated society” the dictum of the critic Alphonse Karr was all too true: “Il y a
quelqu’un de plus odieux que le bourreau, c’est la victime.”69
67
Barth, Türke, 1. In “Die Türkenhetze,” 132, Barth reduced Armenian casualties to “no
more than 29,000 Armenians killed,” a figure whose offhandedness offered a broad target
to Lepsius, no slouch himself at sarcasm.
68
Harden, “Der ächte Kreuzzug,” Die Zukunft 4, no. 51, Sept. 19, 1896: 521–25, 524.
Cf. Consul Skene in 1860 (“abject” yet “insolent”), quoted in Bilâl N. Şimşir, ed., British
Documents on Ottoman Armenians (Ankara, 1982) 1:xxx (Şimşir omits positive stereotypes on the same page). Among those uncritically mouthing negative stereotypes was
William L. Langer: “One traveler after another was impressed with their [Armenian] cowardice and servility.” Conceding the “all too frequent plunderings and massacres,” Langer
sighs, “So it had been for thousands of years and so it continued. The government was
perfectly helpless.” The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1890–1902 (New York, 1951), 148;
see also 151.
69
Lepsius, “Armenier und Türken,” 478. At a rally in Paris, Feb. 15, 1903, Francis de
Pressensé, deputy for Rhône and president of the League of the Rights of Man, mocked
Europeans who reproached Armenians “for having been too moderate, too docile, for
having proffered their throats like lambs, for having gone bleating to the slaughterhouse.
Ah! Certainly it is easy to be heroic for others while . . . reading the newspaper with your
feet on a cushion.” Pour l’Arménie, 25.
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Cringing (yet insolent), the Armenian-as-victim was of course the flip side of
the second strand: the Armenian-as-shyster, who fleeced the Turkish peasant,
amassing the entire Ottoman economy into his own sticky hands.70 Barth himself
“proved” the stereotype by trotting out a “proverb” beloved of all self-proclaimed
experts on the Orient from London to Petersburg: “One Greek is able to cheat
two Jews, but one Armenian can cheat two Greeks.”71 Elements of this discourse
had already appeared in the works of orientalists such as Alfred Körte, the archaeologist; Karl Krummbacher, founder of Byzantine studies in Germany; and
Hugo Grothe, a geographer who assured readers that not Muslim fanaticism (the
explanation of choice among armenophiles) but Armenian exploitation was responsible for the violence.72 By 1913, Grothe was arguing that Muslim looters
were merely reappropriating what Armenians had stolen, an argument ready for
retooling after 1933, when he joined the SA.73 With the sanction of such schol-
70
“Even Jews have their good points, but Armenians have none”: Sir Mark Sykes,
quoted in G. S. Graber, Caravans to Oblivion: The Armenian Genocide, 1915 (New York,
1996), 25–26. Tartar, mouse-trap dealer, Armenian: Otto von Bismarck’s epithets for an
Austrian antagonist, quoted in Erich Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire (London,
1950), 32. Extenuating the massacres in 1896 are Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw,
who note that in the course of the violence the sultan ordered “the government to crack
down on the Armenian merchants of Istanbul to lessen their substantial economic power.”
History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, Reform, Revolution, and Republic (Cambridge, 1997), 203–4. Imagine if a historian wrote that Hitler’s government
had decided to “crack down” on Berlin’s Jews.
71
Barth, Türke, 60. In his Zukunft piece, Barth omitted the couplet’s reference to “Jews,”
probably in deference to the sensitivities of (the now baptized) Harden. But purged of its
slur against Jews, Barth’s “proverb’s” charge against the Armenians was then multiplied
tenfold: “When it comes to sharp practices, one Armenian is a match for twenty Greeks.”
“Die Türkenhetze,” 130. Variations were endless. Karl May’s “Der Kys-Kaptschiji” (1896–
97) puts one Jew over ten Christians, one Yankee over fifty Jews, but one Armenian over
a hundred Yankees. Hans-Walter Schmuhl, “Friedrich Naumann und die ‘armenische
Frage’: Die deutsche Öffentlichkeit und die Verfolgung der Armenier vor 1914,” in Kieser
and Schaller, Der Völkermord, 503–16, 508. In Petersburg in 1898, W. T. Stead reported
that “Russians are never tired of repeating that it takes two Greeks to swindle a Jew, two
Jews to cheat the devil, but it takes two devils to cheat an Armenian.” The United States
of Europe on the Eve of the Parliament of Peace (New York, 1899), 249–50. In 1922, an
American pastor retailed a milder form. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide:
Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005),
8. Whatever the version, the Armenian always comes out worst.
72
Körte, Anatolische Skizzen (Berlin, 1896); Krummbacher, “Die Armenische Kunst”
(1896), republished in his Populäre Aufsätze (Leipzig, 1909), 267–78. Axel Meißner, “Die
Hamidischen Armenier-massaker—Karl Krummbacher, Heinrich Gelzer, und die byzantinische Hymnographin Kassia,” Stimme der Orthodoxie 3 (1997): 141–45, 142.
73
Grothe wrote Lepsius in 1897 offering to use his connections to the new Provincial
President of Rio to have Armenians transported to Brazil, where in three years they would
earn enough to become landowners. Grothe to Lepsius, Oct. 14, 1897, LAH, NC 59.
Grothe’s anti-Armenian stereotypes: “Die asiatische Türkei und die deutschen Interessen:
Gedanken zur inneren Umgestaltung des armenischen Reiches und zu den Zielen der
deutschen Kulturpolitik,” Der Neue Orient 9 (1913), 16, cited in Hilmar Kaiser, Imperialism, Racism, and Development Theories: The Construction of a Dominant Paradigm on
101
arship, the discourse of Armenian-as-exploiter made frequent appearances in
newspapers close to the government, ready for quoting in other venues. It was
also common in Pan-German circles.74
The Left sometimes proved as susceptible as the Right. The democratic Frankfurter Zeitung published lines by the poetess Kassia, in its series “Famous Women
in Ancient Greece and Byzantium,” that described the Armenians as “quite horrifying people,” malicious in low positions, worse when prosperous, and worst
of all when they rose to high estate. This “apt” little epigram from the ninth
century was billed by the editors as a “contribution to the current debate.” It
supported, they pointed out helpfully, the “Turkish view in substance, if not in
particulars.”75
The double-dealing Armenian also turned up in travel articles by Friedrich
Naumann, the charismatic Left Liberal leader whose democratic nimbus Liberals
in the postwar Federal Republic have been proud to claim for themselves. (It is
Naumann’s name that graces the research foundation established by the Free
Democratic Party in 1958 to support liberal values in scholarship.) In describing
an evening spent with German expats in Constantinople, Naumann quoted at
length one who, to unanimous accord, justified the massacres as the “self-defense”
of honest, upright Turks, a people exploited by the grasping Armenian, who would
steal from his own brother, sell his wife and prepubescent daughter, and morally
befoul the whole city.76 Naumann’s description was immediately lifted by Karl
May, the era’s most popular adventure writer. In the Empire of the Silver Lion
(1898) quoted Naumann to add force to the novelist’s own axiom that the “hawknosed Armenian” was someone who (“speaking generally and on average”) could
be counted on to have a hand in the game “whenever and wherever in the Orient
any kind of vile thing” went down. Since May’s previous writings had long made
his distaste for Armenians clear, we may wonder who was recycling whom.77
We recognize these stereotypes, of course, but associate them with other vicOttoman Armenians (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997), 16. On the repackaging of Grothe’s “Vorderasienkommittee” as the “Vorderasiengesellschaft” and then as the “Vorderasien Institut,”
none of which had much substantial reality: Jürgen Kloosterhuis, “Friedliche Imperialisten”: Deutsche Auslandsvereine und auswärtige Kulturpolitik, 1906–1918, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1994), 1:344, which also uncovers Grothe’s membership in the SA.
74
Government outlets are listed in Schulthess’ Europäisches Geschichtskalender (Munich, 1896), 275–76. Pan-Germans: Kaiser, Imperialism, 17–18.
75
Frankfurter Zeitung, Oct. 29, 1898, quoted in Nazaret Naltchayan, “Kaiser Wilhelm
II’s Visits to the Ottoman Empire: Rationale, Reactions, and the Meaning of Images,”
Armenian Review 42, no. 2/166 (Summer 1989): 47–78, 58.
76
Naumann, “Hinter Konstantinopel,” Die Hilfe 4, no. 45 (Nov. 6, 1898): 5–7, 7; the
lines appear again in Naumann, “Asia,” 31–32.
77
As for the “much-talked-of Armenian disturbances,” opined May, “one knows of
course how and to what end” they were “staged.” Karl May’s gesammelte Reiseerzählungen, vol. 27, Im Reiche des silbernen Löwen (Freiburg, 1898), 478–79. May’s almost
verbatim quote of Naumann is noted by Schmuhl, in “Friedrich Naumann und die ‘armenische Frage,’” 508, who also quotes Naumann’s praise for the Frankfurter Zeitung’s
turn away from its call for intervention as a sign of “the rethinking process . . . in our
democracy.” “Politische Notizen,” Die Hilfe 6, no. 24 (June 17, 1900): 3.
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tims.78 And we have become so familiar with Edward Said’s famous analogy
between antisemitism and its “secret sharer,” Orientalism (described by him as
antisemitism’s “Islamic branch”), that we have all but forgotten that these tropes
were once used against a Christian people on behalf of a Muslim one.79 This too
was Orientalism. It was also, as Hilmar Kaiser’s analysis of the afterlife of these
tropes in a certain kind of leftist scholarship has shown, another Socialism of
Fools.80
III. EXPLANATIONS
We would be naive to assume that all those who disparaged Armenians or hyped
the Turks were acting spontaneously. A half century ago, William L. Langer
warned that “we know enough now about the systematic bribery of the French
press by the Russians . . . to disabuse us of all exaggerated notions about the value
of so-called public opinion.”81 Suborning journalists, leaking “information,” subsidizing both invective and accolades were common practices, then as now. In
1914, Russia quietly put the editor of Jeune Turc on its payroll.82 Young Turks
were no less savvy about using the European press. And the sultan, whose experience during the 1870s gave him reason to fear an aroused European public,
also did his best, as we have seen, to manipulate it.83 His ambassadors, required
to give a regular accounting of how the press in their respective capitals was
reporting Ottoman developments, and fearful that a slender diplomatic pouch
might call their diligence into question, likewise planted articles in European
organs, in order to have clippings to send home. Germany’s ambassador in Constantinople, after initially assuming that only insignificant papers were vulnerable,
Cf. Harden: Filled with the “ugliest mercenary spirit [Händlergeist],” oriental Christians have taken on “all the characteristics European Christians like to ascribe to the scions
of Shem [i.e., Jews].” “Der ächte Kreuzzug,” 424. Shem: Gen. 9:18–29.
79
Said: “I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western
anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism, resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and political truth that
needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood.”
Orientalism (1977; New York, 1979), 27–28, 286–87.
80
In Imperialism, Kaiser has traced a dependency-theory discourse, with exploiters now
dressed up social scientifically as “compradors,” through footnotes to these same turn-ofthe-century orientalists, geographers, and propagandists. The provenance of “Socialism of
Fools,” coined in the Habsburg monarchy to characterize antisemitism: Andrew G. Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools: Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism
(Berkeley, 1975), 338 n. 27.
81
Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism, 59.
82
Ambassador M. M. Giers to Foreign Minister S. D. Sazonov, telegram no. 355, June
14, 1914, in Die Internationalen Beziehungen im Zeitalter des Imperialismus: Dokumente
aus den Archiven der Zarischen und der Provisorischen Regierung, ed. Otto Hoetzsch
(Berlin, 1933; trans. of Soviet edition), ser. 1, no. 240, 3:219.
83
In addition to Herzl diaries cited above, see Hanioğlu, Young Turks, 74, and Preparation, 9, 13–14. Indirect evidence: Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology
and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London, 1998), 36.
78
103
soon expressed disquiet about his Ottoman counterpart’s relationship with the
Wilhelmine press, which was “in Berlin no secret.”84
Hans Barth, employed as Rome correspondent of the left liberal Berliner Tageblatt, was almost certainly on the take from the Ottomans. Who else would have
covered the costs of publishing Turk, Defend Yourself! a pamphlet on steroids,
with gilt-edged pages? Of having it translated into French? Of reissuing it, in
German and Turkish, over and over again—most recently in 2003, seventy-five
years after the death of its author? (Its title, translated literally in the 1988 Turkish
edition, has lately undergone a transfiguration: it is now O Turk, Awake, which
echoes the title of a flaming tract by Mehmed Emin, founder of Turkey’s nationalist school of poetry.)85 Although difficult to prove as a general proposition, the
Porte’s influence on the German press helps explain why, as Rosa Luxemburg
marveled in the bloody autumn of 1895, in some German papers “Turkey was
still being portrayed as a utopia where ‘the different nationalities have lived next
to each other peacefully for centuries’” and any dissatisfaction was the result of
European diplomats’ “persuading the happy peoples of Turkey that they are oppressed.”86
Nevertheless, armenophile fulminations against Turkey’s “lie factory” were a
convenient surrogate for an anger that would have been better directed nearer
home. As Stoecker surmised, Germany’s own authorities had done their best,
behind the decent draperies of the Rechtsstaat, to smother the movement for
Armenian human rights. Police and provincial governors, the ministers of religious affairs and of the interior, the foreign secretary and the chancellor, Chlodwig
Fürst zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst: all intervened to rein in the clergy, prohibit
rallies and collections on church property, and deport Armenian speakers.87 Was
Hugo, Fürst Radolin, to Leo von Caprivi, June 7, 1893, AAI Deutschland 127, no. 6,
Bd. 1 (Microfilm no. 14160, R 1733).
85
Le droit du croissant (Paris, 1898); Türk savun kendini (Istanbul, 1988), now Ey Türk
uyan (Istanbul, 2003). German printings in 1980 and 1988, title pages bearing no imprint
of publisher, place, or any other indication of origin, are noted in Meißner, “Die Hamidischen Armenier-massaker,” 145 n. 40. Another appeared in 1989 in Communist East
Germany (Altenburg: Stephan Geibel & Co). Gilt pages: Feigel, Das evangelische
Deutschland, 63.
86
“Die nationalen Kämpfe in der Türkei und die Sozialdemocratie I,” GW 1, pt. 1:57–
58. Whether Luxemburg’s inverted commas indicate irony or direct quotation is unclear.
Bernstein made similar complaints: Die Leiden, 3. An undated five-page memo in the
British Foreign Office describing the Constantinople correspondents of many of Berlin’s
leading dailies, mostly liberal, as on the Porte’s payroll is cited in Vahakn N. Dadrian, The
History of the Armenian Genocide (Providence, RI, 1997), 97, 100 n. 38. But its own
origins (a Russian paper “of World War I vintage”) are not unimpeachable.
87
Quote: Pastor Suderow, Bergische Landeszeitung, no. 79, Oct. 3, 1896. Similar
charges were made by Lepsius, Sept. 23, 1896, reported by the Berlin police. In Barmen,
Pastor Weber extended the bribery charge to the Austrian press. GStA PK I. HA Rep. 77,
tit. 343a (Polizeisachen), no. 177, Bl. 39, 85, 91. This file contains 103 pages of correspondence between German authorities, 1896–97, on suppressing armenophile agitation.
Germany was not alone in obliging the Porte by silencing the sultan’s opponents. British
authorities moved against Ibrahim al-Muwaylihi, Italian authorites against Wasif Bey, and
84
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Anderson
this illegitimate? The Protestant church was conceded even by its own members
to be under state authority. The press, however, was supposed to be free. True,
certain newspapers (offiziöse, in common parlance) lived on government subsidies. One of the duties of an aspiring diplomat was to draft articles destined for
such outlets, articles quoted freely by other papers—but with attribution. Such
organs were offering the government’s take on foreign affairs. They knew it, and
their readers knew it. But German readers, enjoying what was probably the most
varied press landscape in the world, thought they knew which papers were independent. Few were aware of a system of story laundering whereby material
Berlin wanted disseminated was leaked to a newspaper abroad in hopes that
enterprising domestic editors would reprint it, citing the foreign journal as an
unimpeachable source. And most would have been shocked to learn how far the
long arm of the Foreign Office extended into Germany’s own liberal democratic
press. The savvy Austrian newshound Heinrich Kanner, although certainly not
born yesterday, was astounded in 1916 to hear from the lips of a veteran German
diplomat that a celebrated columnist at the once fiercely independent Frankfurter
Zeitung had been for the past two decades, unbeknownst to his readers (and
probably his editors), “actually an official of the Foreign Office,” from which he
drew a considerable salary. Bribery, of course, was expensive. A cheaper incentive, and perhaps as effective, was “access” to official sources, which the Wilhelmstrasse conferred upon a few privileged journalists.88
Is it government influence that explains why Armenian grievances were systematically downplayed in the German press, while stories hostile to their cause
were never officially contradicted? Germany’s ambassador to Constantinople in
February 1913, in urging a shift of Berlin’s Orientpolitik in a direction more
friendly to Armenians, conceded as much. For among the corollaries of such a
reorientation, he listed a reversal in the Wilhelmstrasse’s press policy: the German
press would have “to give up its previous rejection of everything Armenian” and
adopt “a moderate and understanding attitude” toward Armenian interests.89 Here
was an implicit acknowledgment of just how heavy Berlin’s hand had been.
Yet however unsavory their methods, all governments had reason not to want
their options limited by public agitation and to mistrust the “answers” offered by
the Swiss deported Emrulla Efendi and Tevfik Nevzad, publishers of Hidmet, the latter
with close ties to the Young Turks. Hanioğlu, Young Turks, 68–69.
88
August Stein was the columnist. Interview with Count Anton Monts, Oct. 14, 1916,
Hoover Archives, Kanner Papers, box 1, vol. 1:173. More generally: Irmgard Farah, Die
Deutsche Pressepolitik und Propagandatätigkeit im Osmanischen Reich von 1908–1918
unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des ‘Osmanischen Lloyd’ (Beirut, 1993), 61 and 61 n.
3; Gerhard Hense, “Kommunikationsobservanz in Wilhelminischer Zeit (1890–1914),” in
Deutsche Kommunikationskontrolle des 15. bis 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Heinz-Dietrich
Fischer (Munich, 1982), 153–84, 169; Isolde Rieger, Die Wilhelminische Presse im Überblick (Munich, 1957), 42–43.
89
Baron Hans von Wangenheim to Bethmann Hollweg, Bericht 58, Feb. 24, 1913, Türkei 183, Bd. 29, in Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914: Sammlung
der Diplomatischen Akten des Auswärtigen Amtes, ed. J. Lepsius, A. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and F. Thimme, 40 vols. (Berlin, 1926) 38:14.
105
armenophile activists—when they offered any answers at all. Lepsius, for example, believed in Germany’s duty, by virtue of its moral superiority (thanks to
the Reformation) over Latin and Slavic peoples, to lead the other powers in establishing the Kingdom of God on earth—an agenda not widely shared. Some
armenophiles were fervent pacifists. The French and Italian radicals demanding
intervention do not give the impression of having thought very hard about ways
and means.90 The British public, aware of their empire’s power, seem less aware
that eastern Anatolia, the Armenian heartland, was landlocked and, as Lord Salisbury noted in another context, “We are fish.”91 One must look very hard, at least
until 1912, to find anyone wondering how national liberation for Armenians
would square with the national aspirations of Turks and Kurds. As for Russia,
when Salisbury suggested to Nicholas II that they depose Abdul Hamid if he did
not accede to the Great Powers’ reforms, the tsar retorted, in an unwonted access
of wisdom, that any successor installed by Christian powers would be the target
of assassination. And then? “The intolerable burden of pacifying or governing
the Turkish empire would be thrown upon the Russians”—an early version of
Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn principle”: You break it, you own it.92 Salisbury
was similarly checked by his sense that any action of Britain’s was “very likely
to bring down the Turkish Empire with a run.”93
Thus, while the powers could threaten to put the Ottoman Empire out of its
misery, the Ottomans themselves could threaten to die.94 And lurking in the shadows of any Ottoman demise, statesmen knew, was the specter of communal chaos
and a general War of Ottoman Succession that might turn Europe itself into a
charnel house. These were dilemmas that England, France, and Russia, with concrete and important stakes already in the region, had to grapple with. Germany,
however, whose stake in the Near East was more abstract, did not. Its interest lay
in taking advantage of opportunities within the empire and in making sure that,
in whatever reconfiguration might follow the empire’s unraveling, the resulting
balance of power in Europe and the Near East did not shift to its detriment. We
should not be surprised that it too preferred the devil it knew to the devil it didn’t
know.
Still, if it seems clear why the Wilhelmstrasse did its best to push Armenian
grievances out of the news, it is less obvious why its efforts did not meet stronger
90
One pacifist “solution” was an international tribunal. Die Waffen nieder 4, no. 12
(1895): 407, 450, 459–60, cited in Feigel, Das evangelische Deutschland, 48–49. Lepsius’s agenda, as characterized by a critic: “Wochenschau,” Die Hilfe 6, no. 24 (June 17,
1900): 2. French and Italian demands: Pour l’Arménie.
91
Quoted in Paul Schroeder, “The 19th-Century International System: Changes in the
Structure,” World Politics 39, no. 1 (Oct. 1986): 1–26, 9.
92
Nicholas quoted in Douglas, “Britain and the Armenian Question,” 129.
93
Salisbury to Ambassador Sir Philip Currie, Aug. 12, 1895, quoted in Peter Marsh,
“Lord Salisbury and the Ottoman Massacres,” Journal of British Studies 11, no. 2 (May
1972): 68–83, 77.
94
I am reframing A. J. P. Taylor’s comment about postwar Germany and the powers in
The Origins of the Second World War (1961; New York, 1968), 29.
106
Anderson
counterpressure from civil society, pulling them back in. Economic interests are
not the culprit: as late as 1914, German investment in the Ottoman Empire was
still only a quarter of that of the British and French.95 Our temptation is to reach
for “political culture,” the historians’ eject button, its red light blinking “Hit me!”
when all else fails. With a closer look at the protagonists, however, perhaps we
can avoid a bailout.
Some of the explanation for the German difference surely lies in the depth of
Germany’s confessional antagonisms. In England and America the humanitarian
coalition that evangelicals had forged around antislavery in the first half of the
nineteeth century proved sturdy enough to incorporate Unitarian, Jewish, and
freethinking elites around the cause of Armenian Christians by its end. In France,
for all the battles between republicans and Catholics at home, anticlericalism
stopped at the water’s edge.96 But in Germany, where the religious Other played
a far more central role in the construction of identities, so leery were secular
intellectuals and Jews of the endeavors of the pious that even a whiff of “clerical
politics” could prove toxic. As C. H. Becker remarked to a fellow orientalist, for
many people “the very appearance of a mission man [at a meeting] is a red rag.”97
As for Christians themselves, mutual suspicion between Protestants and Catholics structured all their relationships.98 Whether or not the armenophile movement can be convicted of antisemitism, there can be little doubt of its automatic,
almost programmatic anti-Catholicism, Lepsius not excepted. Martin Rade, his
ally in publicizing the Armenian plight, a man who would break a lance for the
Jews of Russia in 1905 and for the Muslims of Bulgaria in 1913, was a founding
member of the militant Protestant League (Evangelischer Bund), one of Germany’s largest mass organizations, whose mission, in the words of one of its
leaders (himself passionately engaged on the Armenians’ behalf), was to “break
the power of Rome on German soil.”99 Protestant League gatherings, along with
those of the equally anti-Catholic Gustav-Adolf Association, provided important
Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 (Princeton, NJ,
1968), 10. Even the much-cited Anatolian railway was internationally financed, although
the Deutsche Bank held, almost unwillingly, a leadership position. Lothar Gall, “Die Deutsche Bank von ihrer Gründung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, 1870–1914,” in Die Deutsche
Bank, 1870–1995, ed. Gall et al. (Munich, 1995), 1–137, 71–82.
96
J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of
French Colonialism, 1885–1914 (Oxford, 2006).
97
Becker to Martin Hartmann, Dec. 17, 1914, in Islamkunde und Islamwissenschaft im
Deutschen Kaiserreich: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Carl Heinrich Becker und Martin
Hartmann (1900–1918), ed. Ludmila Hanisch (Leiden, 1992), 81.
98
See, e.g., Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture,
Politics, and Ideology, 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ, 1995), esp. Adolf Harnack’s comment,
13.
99
Willibald Beyschlag, quoted in Smith, German Nationalism, 52, 58. Beyschlag as
armenophile: Meißner, Martin Rade’s “Christliche Welt,” 69–72, 109, 129–30. Rade’s
efforts for Jews and Muslims: ibid., 102, 102 nn. 306–7, 211, 240–42. The Protestant
League: Gangolf Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik (Tübingen, 1994), 239;
Heinrichs, Das Judenbild, 433.
95
107
venues for soliciting support for Armenian human rights. Could such gatherings
have sought Catholic participation in a broad armenophile coalition? And if they
had, would they have succeeded? The coverage of Pastor Lepsius’s biggest rally
in Berlin by the city’s Catholic daily, normally sympathetic to Armenians, suggests not. It relegated the rally to a single paragraph on a back page (right below
an account of a local chess champion) and devoted half of that paragraph to
reprinting the negative commentary of an offiziöse organ.100 In such an environment, the very narratives that encouraged some Germans to identify with distant
sufferers, recognizing them as “neighbors,” implicitly marked as “Other” the rest
of their countrymen, erecting impassable barriers to coalition building.
Moreover, susceptibility to the turcophile narrative owed much, especially after
the turn of the century, to the perception that Germans themselves had a future
in the Orient. Associations to further the study of Islam, encourage GermanTurkish cultural exchange, facilitate tourism and investment in Anatolia vied for
members with even more ambitious organizations aimed at financing clinics along
the Baghdad railway and founding a university in Constantinople.101 With most
of the globe carved up by the other powers, what sunnier spot for German energies
than down in Turkey far away, where they might flourish at the invitation of the
Ottoman government—so long, at least, as it remained independent? The German
Empire’s increasingly manifest destiny as bulwark of Islam against the imperialist
rapacity of the Entente, a favorite theme among public intellectuals, contributed
to the sense of German proprietorship in an Anatolian place in the sun.
That sense of proprietorship was important. The point of turcophile propaganda
all along had been not only to ward off European intervention, nor even to purvey
hopes of a radiant Ottoman spring made glorious summer by the sun of German
investment, but also to encourage Germans to identify with Turkish power. In
this, it succeeded. As early as the 1890s, if we can believe the novelist Theodor
Fontane, it was fashionable among Berlin heads of households to wear a fez in
the family circle.102 By 1900, the Byzantinist Heinrich Gelzer was marveling that
“it is now the ‘in’ thing to enthuse over the Turks, and anyone who doesn’t
automatically go along with this fashion is considered narrow-minded and a person with backward views.”103 Even the Adana pogrom of 1909, which took another 20,000 Armenian lives, did not dampen enthusiasm for the New Turkey’s
allegedly rising crescent.104
100
“Local-Nachrichten . . . Der armenischen Greuel,” Germania, no. 212, Sept. 13, 1896,
2. Blatt.
101
For these and similar organizations: Kloosterhuis, “Friedliche Imperialisten,” 2:
563–697.
102
Die Poggenpuhls, 106. Cf. Leipzigers with red fezzes: Naumann, “Hinter Konstantinopel,” 7.
103
Heinrich Gelzer, Geistliches und Weltliches aus dem türkisch-griechischen Orient:
Selbsterlebtes und Selbstgesehenes (Leipzig, 1900), quoted in Meißner, “Die Hamidischen
Armenier-massaker,” 144.
104
Saupp points out that, “surprisingly” in contrast to the Catholic Germania, only on
May 9, almost a month after the massacres, did the Liberal Frankfurter Zeitung publish
108
Anderson
In 1911, the liberal journalist Ernst Jäckh, well connected with progressive
intellectual and business circles and now embarking on a career in promoting the
New Turkey, ushered a convoy of Ottoman dignitaries on an informational junket
through Germany in the service of closer relations. Everywhere, he reported, that
East met West and the “representatives of the New Turkey” came into contact
with the “neudeutschen Volk,” they both experienced a shock of recognition. Jäckh
quoted an Ottoman visitor to the effect that if some catastrophe destroyed European civilization, leaving “only the German type,” it would be possible to recreate
“all of Europe” from that alone. His German hosts, in return for being credited
with what amounted to the DNA of Western civilization, reportedly expressed
similar delight: “That’s what the Turks are like? So cultivated and clever, so
imposing and simpatico, so European, ja—so German!”105
Praise for Turks meant praise for Germans.106 The hosannas reached their
height, of course, during the Great War, when a military alliance provided additional reasons for seeking Self in the Other. At the very moment when Turks were
marching Armenians to their deaths, Jäckh (a self-described “Zivil-Apostel,” who
ended his career as Carnegie Professor of International Relations at Columbia)
edited a series of pamphlets extolling Turkey’s genocidal leadership and writing
articles with such titles as “Ex Oriente Lux.”107
IV. EASTS AND WESTS
Was it wise for the Armenian cause in Germany to become so closely associated
with the particular vision of Bible Christians and their narratives of martyrdom
rather than with more universal discourses, such as the rights of man? Probably
not. But Lepsius’s efforts to mobilize a movement that would encompass every
confessional and political current went nowhere. Anticipating by more than half
a century Hannah Arendt’s observations about the weakness of the category “humanity” as a basis for obligation, he remarked bitterly, “Humanity on this occasion
has failed in Germany—indeed, has failed completely. . . . Not one man, who
wasn’t from Christian circles, has come to any of our rallies.”108 Lepsius exaggerated. But not by much.
an extended account, not from its own correspondent but from Paris’s Figaro. Das Deutsche Reich, 198–99.
105
Jäckh, “Der Gentleman des Orients,” Reclams Universum 29, no. 7 (1912), JäckhCU, box 14.
106
Turkey’s “Renaissance” was mediated by German initiative and German science:
Jäckh, “Die Bagdadbahn,” in Die Flotte 14, no. 11 (Nov. 1911), Jäckh-CU, box 14.
107
“Ex Oriente Lux,” Das Größere Deutschland 2, no. 12 (March 20, 1915): 369–72,
and “Das Licht aus dem Morgenland,” Deutsche Politik 1, no. 52 (Dec. 22, 1916): 2217–
22. In the former case, “East” meant Rumania. “Zivil-Apostel” and even “Weltbotschafter”
appear in Jäckh’s outline for an autobiography, “Erntefrucht des Goldenen Pflugs,” dated
1958–59, Jäckh-CU, box 1.
108
“Die Gräuel und der Notstand in Armenien,” Lokal-Anzeiger, Sept. 19, 1996; punctuation added for clarity. Quote recorded by police at a rally in Barmen, Jan. 14, 1897,
109
We should not be surprised. Human rights take their color and their shape from
the vessels into which they are poured. As Lepsius’s movement and reactions to
it demonstrate, the question “who is my neighbor?” is inevitably a question about
oneself and a question about the Other, a question of identification and rejection,
of affection and distance. Toward people who are really far away, one can be
indifferent; but the closer the distant sufferer is brought to home, the more the
discussion of his “human” rights gets drawn into older debates and established
identities, and the more it becomes a colloquy among people whose own narratives shape and color these conversations. As Americans saw during the Balkan
wars of the 1990s, for some of us the Bosnians were “Czechs” (1938); for others,
“Jews” (1941); for still others, “Nazi collaborators” (1941–45).
Thus, human rights campaigns—as Michael Ignatieff has lately reminded us—
are always campaigns for particular humans, even when advocates speak the
language of universality: “Everyone’s universalism ultimately anchors itself in a
particuliar commitment to a specifically important group of people whose cause
is close to one’s heart or conviction.” Although NGOs claim to be an “antipolitics,” Ignatieff argues, “in practice” their activism “means taking sides and
mobilizing constituencies powerful enough to force abusers to stop. As a consequence, effective human rights activism is bound to be partial and political.”
Nor is it surprising that when interventions grow out of these campaigns, the
demand for “human rights is increasingly seen” by the targets of such interventions “as the language of moral imperialism.”109 Ignatieff is speaking of the past
two decades, but his words would have applied as well a century ago. Lepsius
himself rejected the charge of a double standard, offering to support any relief
effort Hans Barth cared to organize for suffering Turks. The issue, he insisted,
was not whether one preferred Armenians to Turks or vice versa. Rather, “the
butchers have a priori my antipathy; the victims, however I might otherwise think
of their value, have my sympathy.”110
But Lepsius failed to acknowledge that conflicts are often between victims. As
historians know, the fall of empires, however tyrannical, and the founding of new
nation-states—Greece, Bulgaria, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, Israel, Croatia, and,
after 1988, the republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia—inevitably create minorities
who become new victims.111 And when victims are in conflict, human rights
GStA PK I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 343a no. 177. Even after the war, efforts to put Lepsius’s
movement on a secular basis failed. At “monstrous” expense it distributed materials to
youth organizations, educational groups, Volksvereine, and several thousand women’s associations. Only a dozen responded, the woman employed for outreach finding that “no
interest for our work is to be expected in those circles.” Richard Schafer concluded that
religious donors, although often reactionary, still “alone are the ones who are carrying the
mission and the emergency relief efforts now.” Schafer to Alice Lepsius, Jan. 18, 1926,
LAH, NC 14632.
109
Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” in Gutman, ed., Human Rights, 3–
52, 9, 20.
110
Lepsius, “Armenier und Türken,” 478.
111
E.g., Stephan Astourian, “Armenian Migration Crises in the South Caucasus and Their
Consequences, 1988–2000,” Contemporary Caucasus Newsletter 9 (Fall 2000): 6–10.
110
Anderson
movements are in competition.112 Ignatieff did not cite Hegel’s commentary on
Antigone, but he might have: a tragedy is not the conflict between Good and Evil,
but between Good and Good.
The war that ended the Armenian Question so murderously ended the Eastern
Question as well. It marked the transformation of the state system from one that
still had a place for empires, with their fuzzy frontiers and mixed but unmixable
populations, to one based on nation-states, with hard (though disputed) borders
and aspirations to a homogenous population. This transformation lit the fuse for
even worse explosions. It also meant the relinquishing of a part of Europe’s own
heritage: the Near East, once called “the Orient.”113
The Near East has disappeared from our geography, mental and political. All
our talk today is of the Far East—and, of course, of the Middle East. We know
what the Middle East is: job searches in history departments define it interchangeably with Islam. But few ask what happened to the Near East, or even where it
was. In Metternich’s famous pronouncement, “Asia begins at the Landstrasse,”
Vienna’s third district. Yet if you google “Asia” with “Landstrasse,” you will find
that as often as not Asien is given as “the Balkans,” with the remark interpreted
either as a sign of xenophobia or the quip of a frivolous aristocrat. But what if
Metternich was serious—and right? Friedrich Naumann’s best-selling travelogue,
entitled “Asia” (1900), begins in Athens, wanders around the eastern Mediterranean, and ends in Naples. When the revolutionary journalist Alexander Helphand announced a three-month trip to the “Orient,” his destinations were Belgrade
and Sofia.114 Arnold Toynbee, struggling in 1916 to characterize what he called
“the Janus-character” of the Near East, agreed with Metternich that “Vienna is
the most conspicuous boundary-mark,” but he felt that Trieste, L’vov, or even
Prague would also do. Syria (then one-third Christian) was definitely in it, but
geographers, he said, might extend it to the edge of the Sahara. Thus the Near
East “encroaches,” Toynbee believed, on both the German-speaking and the
Arabic-speaking worlds.115 The essential characteristic of the Near East, it seems
clear, was that it was neither Islamic nor Christian, but precisely a belt of mixed
Christian, Muslim, and Jewish populations.
Thus their Orient was not quite so far away (or indeed so Other) as our own
age and notions of Orientalism suppose. Bismarck’s oft-quoted line about the
Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” 20, 8–9.
An equation Adolf Grabowsky makes explicit: “Die Grundlagen der Orientpolitik,”
in Deutschland und der Orient (Berlin, 1915), 3.
114
Rosa Luxemburg to Konstantin Zetkin, Sept. 20, 1910, in Luxemburg, Gesammelte
Briefe, 6 vols. (Berlin, 1982–) 3:232–33.
115
The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, by Viscount
Bryce (London, 1916; Beirut, 1979), 595, and notes. A witty chronology of the supercession of Near East by Middle East: Roderic H. Davison, “Where Is the Middle East?” in
The Modern Middle East, ed. Richard H. Nolte (New York, 1963), 13–19. Similar reflections: K. E. Fleming, “Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography,” American
Historical Review 105, no. 4 (Oct. 2000): 1219–33, 1228.
112
113
111
“Balkans” not being worth the bones of a Pomeranian musketeer never mentioned, it turns out, the Balkans. It was “the whole Orient” for which his humble
musketeer was too dear a price to pay. That is, the Ottoman Empire. That is,
“Turkey.”116 But if when Bismarck said the “ganzen Orient” what he really meant
was the Balkans (so, at least, anglophone historians who misquote him assume),
then Goethe, writing in 1808 that “down in Turkey, far away, / The folks are out
bashing one another,” was surely referring to events taking place not in our Turkey, the Anatolian peninsula, but rather where the first Serbian rebellion was then
reaching its climax: that is, in what was ever Europe’s Orient, an East that might
at any given moment be either “down in Turkey, far away” or very, very near.117
For Europeans, this Orient, the Near East, was both Other and Self. And, as the
varying responses to the Armenian-Turkish conflict reveal, that Self might well
be Muslim; and the Other, the Christian “Levantine.”
116
Stenographische Berichte des deutschen Reichstags, Dec. 5, 1876 (Berlin, 1876):
585. Misquotes are too numerous to mention. Even in World War I, Germans might use
“Balkans” and “Turkey” interchangeably, as when the official Zensurbuch referred to the
abolition of the capitulations in Turkey and then urged reporters to exercise “the greatest
reservation . . . in judging all Balkan matters.” Quotation in Kurt Muhsam, Wie wir belogen
wurden: Die amtliche Irreführung des deutschen Volkes (Munich, 1918), 65.
117
The Ottomans themselves put their empire’s “heartland” in the Balkans. Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge, 2000), 2, 111; Kemal H. Karpat, The
Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faiths, and Community in the Late
Ottoman State (Oxford, 2001), 13.

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